The present invention relates to a gesture recognition device, a method for recognizing a gesture, a program for executing the method for recognizing a gesture, and a computer readable medium storing the program.
Kinds of input devices, e.g., a mouse, a trackball, a joystick, and a touch panel, for operating a personal computer are on the market. These input devices give users intuitive operations, which is different from keyboards.
Especially, touch panels are different from other input devices. Since the touch panels do not require a work space and various operations can be made by touching the display with fingers or pens, they are mounted on portable terminals, car navigation system, office automation equipments, portable telephones, and others.
However, the touch panel may be damaged or unclean by the fingers and pens. The device to resolve the problems of the touch panel is a gesture recognition device. Japan Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-78977 discloses one of gesture recognition devices. The gesture recognition device takes images of a gesture of a hand in a free space by a camera, identifies the gesture based on the images and causes a processing unit to execute the operation corresponding to the gesture. Because being not touched during operation, the display of the gesture recognition device does not receive bad influences from operations.